Comments on The Second Coming

"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, written in 1919, several years after the end of World War I. It is named after the Christian "Second Coming," which is the Biblical prophecy that predicts Jesus's return to earth to reign after the end of days.

Yeats's poem describes a very different kind of "Second Coming": an apocalypse led by not Jesus Christ, but rather by a "rough beast" whose approach forms the poem's mysterious conclusion. Reflecting a widespread mood of disenchantment and alienation immediately after the first World War, the poem suggests that modernity represents a kind of chaos, the collapse of civilization rather than its apex.